Senior Air Raid Warden Gilbert Shepherd said that the last air raid on Cardiff, on May 18th 1943, was planned by a Nazi who knew the city.

That was almost certainly Hans Henri Kühnemann, managing director of the German-owned Flotmann Drill Factory in Allensbank Road from 1935 until September 1939.

The factory was less than a mile away from the spot where the last parachute mines were dropped on Cardiff.

Kühnemann, who was born in Cologne in 1900, joined the Nazi Party in 1932 and his membership card showed he had knowledge of Newport and Cardiff. I was sent a copy of the card by the Berlin Record Office.

Kühnemann's office was in Allensbank Road, the site of which was later occupied by a builders' yard, and where student flats are being built in 2005.

On the wall was a photograph of Adolph Hitler and a Swastika Flag. There was also a framed photograph of Kühnemann with Ribentropp, who was the German Ambassador to Britain in the 1930s and who was hanged for war crimes after the Nuremberg trials of leading Nazis.

Fled Britain

A few days before the outbreak of war the Kühnemanns and Flottman's company secretary Herbert Steer and his wife went to London.

Steer left his hotel on he day before war was declared and later told his wife that the Kühnemanns had fled the country with members of the German Embassy staff.

They almost certainly went to Holyhead, from where they caught a boat which took them out into the Irish sea where they boarded a German merchant ship.

Mrs Steer told me in the 1960s that this came as a surprise, as the Kühnemanns had told her that they planned to stay in Britain in the event of war.

Another Nazi who used that route was Fritz Richter, manager of the German-owned enamel works at Barry Docks.

When war broke out the Flottman company was taken over by the British Government under the Custodian of Enemy Property Act.

Herbert Steer, company secretary under Kühnemann, was placed in charge of the firm. His widow told me that Kühnemann was proud of having been one of the first people to join the Nazi Party (card pictured right).

Kühnemann and his wife - reported to be the daughter of a Church of England clergyman - lived at 82 Marborough Road, Cardiff. They had a butler, whom Kühnemann said would join him if he was ever taken to prison.

Mrs Steer next heard from Kühnemann in the 1960s when he wrote to her from Germany.

He asked for a reference from her husband to help the Kühnemanns to return to live in Britain. He didn't know that Herbert Steer had died in 1959. Mrs Steer was so disgusted that she burnt the letter.

According to a report in the South Wales Echo in the 1950s Kühnemann had co-operated with the American Intelligence service after the war.

The Echo also reported that the Nazi had returned to Britain, but was recognised in a Pall Mall Club and jailed. The Home Office told me they had no record of this.

'Jarmany Calling'

Kühnemann was not the only Nazi connected with Cardiff. Dr Friederick Schoberth, who was Professor of German at Cardiff University from 1928 to 1939, joined the Nazi Party in Berlin in 1942. I interviewed him when he was terminally-ill in Nuremberg in 1986.

Dr Schoberth was in Germany on holiday when war broke out in September 1939 and joined the Nazi Party three years later.

He was on the staff of the German Foreign Office and his jobs included editing the scripts of the hated broadcaster Lord Haw Haw, William Joyce, whose propaganda messages started with his infamous 'Jarmany Calling' introduction.

Before the war, American-born William Joyce, who held both British and Irish passports, lived in Colum Road, Cardiff, and also in Newland Street, Barry.

He was captured trying to flee Germany in 1945 and was hanged for treason in London in 1946.

Dr Schoberth spent 18 months in a prisoner-of-war camp then returned to Nuremberg where he helped to rebuild the university which had been destroyed in the blitz.

When I asked if he had planned raids on Cardiff, he replied: "Cardiff, my lovely Cardiff, how could I. My daughter is buried in Llanishen Churchyard."

Dr Schoberth and his wife came back to Cardiff in the 1950s to visit the grave of their daughter who died of meningitis in 1937 when she was only four.

Her headstone can be seen in the cemetery.

Extract from When Wales Went to War
By John O'Sullivan - 2004
Published by Sutton of Stroud